[user104658]

Originally Posted by Ammi

..honestly TS, I just don't get it/don't see it as you do at all...for young people, any of the three young men in that pic to be so easily indoctrinated into 'hate' and into a total lack of any empathy for human life is extremely shocking, how could the belief of such extremism not shock...

Well, I agree that it's shocking in that there are people out there who, at some point down the line, want to covert young people to such cold hatred (the "head of the snake" so to speak), although as a psychologist I certainly don't find it shocking that such is possible, because the human mind is fragile and easily twisted and nor do I find their youth shocking because young minds are even more fragile. The older you get, the more rigid your thought processes become, and the harder you become to indoctrinate. Very young children are exceptionally easy to "mould", which is the basic premise of all hereditary religion. Teenagers and young adults are often still ideologically confused and the right pushing in the right places can completely warp them philosophically and morally.

Like I said, it is horrific and it is shocking that there are people who want to. Despite Kirk's inference (and after, with hypocrisy, suggesting that I have misquoted HIM), I am horrified by terrorism and absolutely condemn it. I don't think these warped young minds can be fixed, or at the very least I think it would be dangerous and realistically not possible to even try on such a scale, and perhaps I can conceded that they are "monsters" insofar as monsters can be created by people with selfish agendas.

Tl;Dr - does it shock me that there are people who set out to create monsters? Yes. Does it shock me that young people can readily be twisted into those monsters? Absolutely not.



ANYWAY - my argument remains. I personally find it equally shocking no matter the skin colour of the young person, but it's evident that most people don't. Not even necessarily on this thread / forum (although as I said, recent threads with assertions of genetic barbarism...) but in general, isn't it evident? Isn't it evident with this story (hoax or not) being major news at all? Does every young "brown" British IS convert spark news stories, debate threads and daily mail hysteria? No. Because people expect that. They can accept that. They can squirrel it away in their mind along with all of the other "foreign folks terrorism stuff in dusty places", say how awful it is, and largely not think about it too much. Some might suggest it as a reason that "these people shouldn't be in our country in the first place!!", etc. That becomes more difficult when the convert being paraded is "little Johnny Edwards from just down th'Road he were always a quiet chap". It destroys that comfort zone and increases the "OMG factor" tenfold for MANY people. There's a reason for that, and in my opinion, it's the same reason that a lot of people find themselves insistent that most if not all extremists are in some way "born wrong", inherently "not normal folks" psychologically, by their very nature. It's because they simply don't want to believe that, but for certain historical twists of fate, these monsters could be their children / nieces / nephews or the teenage boys they see skating past the window every day.